5 Basic Tips to Become a Better Editor

We all know that it is always good to have guest posts on our blog. It’s a win-win situation for both blog owner and guest blogger. We have shared few articles related to guest posting and how to get guest bloggers to write for your blog. If you have missed those articles, here are the links:

Having guest blogger is good but are you sure that how to handle those guest bloggers and how to be a good editor to them? Guest bloggers will only return to your blog if you are nice to them and you know how to efficiently edit the post. Here are few things which I learned about editing since I joined ShoutMeLoud blog network and I guess it would be useful for you too to become a better editor.

No matter what blog niche you are having either its blogging, technology or any other, it is important that you must have good knowledge about it. In simple words, you need to keep yourself updated with what’s going on in blogosphere and specifically in your niche because if you publish a guest article with old information and not updated, it would be bad for your blog and might repeal readers.

Organized work:

Once guest post is in pending status and if you find it worth sharing with your readers then try to publish it as soon as possible. This way you make guest bloggers happy and show that you genuinely care about their posts and don’t make them wait. There are many guest posts which are time sensitive, thus you need to give priorities to such articles first. It is important to know which guest post should publish when and what time.

Formatting:

Guest post might be written by other bloggers but once it’s on your blog’s dashboard, you have to treat it as your post. Guest post should have quality which you can present in front of your readers thus if you think that guest post is lacking in formatting like adding images, adding quotes where required, asking readers view at end etc. then you need to format it as you do it for your own article. As an editor it’s your duty to make an article presentable.

No matter how good guest blogger is but it is very important that you check the grammatical mistakes, check the typo mistakes and make sure that the content is not copied from some other blog. It is also important that you check all that all the links added in article are relevant and not broken. These are few small things but very important to make an article good.

Communication with guest bloggers:

There are chances that guest post is not perfect and do require few changes or correction. If you think you can do those corrections easily then go ahead and correct the guest post otherwise you can mail the guest blogger about the correction needed. Apart from that if you think that article is copied or it is not suitable for your blog niche then do a polite mail saying that you can’t accept the post. You should always mail the guest bloggers in both the cases so that guest bloggers are aware that what the status of their posts is.

Whenever you are getting any guest post for your blog, make sure you treat guest blogger politely and do share feedback with him/her.

All the above tips are very basic but very important for us as an editor. If you are an editor, do share with us what are your strategies to become a better editor?

As an editor too so far, I think sometimes you must control your emotion while editing articles the contributors submited. That is the cases your guest bloggers push more than one time some not good content or mistake in grammar in their works.

Guest blogger are so eager while waiting for publishing. We should notify them the time their post will be online is another basic but important tip.

Thanks Vuong.
Editors should remember that guest bloggers are human and thus there are chances that they will make mistake thus its important that editors edit article with patience.
Letting guest blogger about the status of their post is again an important factor to remember.

Hey Whiz, I will agree with all the points you have mentioned here. If you’re not a good editor and if you don’t communicate with your guest authors regularly, you will lose them for sure. Thanks for sharing an useful article.

Hi! I always think of writing guest articles. since this is the first time i hesitated a lot. I think this article will be very much useful for me and also for beginners. Thanks for sharing with us. Looking forward for still more articles like this.